sept 29

sitting in my shared bed (how many posts begin like this?) listening to mal playing soft music on her ipad, reading a book a new friend gave me for a gift, and already reminiscing my americorps life. I hiked a small portion of the appalachian trail with some members from my team this afternoon. today was the most beautiful day with the most incredible weather. fall is selling me on small virginian country towns. 

the other day as I was driving back from work, as the radio was on and conveniently playing every single song I like and know (I've begun to learn a surprising amount about country music and this was a rare instance where country music was absent from the station for 30 min), the sun was an unbelievable golden bouncing off of the corn fields and orange/green/red leaves, and I was thinking about how I got to this point in my life. and it was all because I had just happened to find out about americorps from a brief conversation with my dad. three days later, I had applied for nccc. which turned into FEMA corps. and now I'm here. sometimes I can't believe how willing I was to ship my body off for 10 months on an adventure that I was nowhere near prepared for. but desperately needed.

we have almost exactly one month left working here in winchester and will then pack ourselves and our belongings (let's be real, it's more like "belonging"-singular) back into our van and drive to sacramento where we will finish the program with two weeks of transitioning, finishing up paperwork, debriefs, and trying not to face the reality of real life which is slowly moving in.

I'm currently waiting to hear back from graduate programs and am already planning my permanent move out of my childhood home and into the real world. but then again, I've been living out of a van essentially for the past seven and a half months, so I guess I've already made that permanent move without realizing it? it's difficult to be completely present in these last moments of the program. because I'm distracted by future plans and the occasional frustrations that come with living and working with seven other people very closely. 

I have no idea how september creeped by...but october is here, and before I know it, I'll be graduating from the first class of FEMA corps at the pacific region campus with a little more than a hundred of the most wonderful individuals I've ever had the pleasure of learning from. I don't know how my life got to be so wonderfully strange and different than what I had ever imagined it would be, but I wouldn't change it for anything.

I can only hope this van ride will last me the rest of my life (not literal van ride, been there done that. it's a once-is-wonderful-enough kind of thing, you know?), dropping me off at moments I can't imagine now and picking me right back up to carry me to people and places that haven't been thought of yet. 

it's going to be a wild ride. 

fall

in between calling FEMA reservists and deploying them all over the country and shoving my face full of halls defense cough drops and blowing my nose in the hallway outside where transportation security administration works diligently away, I feel I need to reevaluate my life a bit. at age 24, I never thought I'd be working atop mt weather, battling the sickness that comes to a southern californian who hasn't experienced the changing seasons before. it's kind of glorious. despite the stuffed sinuses and the several people who ask me to repeat myself when giving them their deployment information (I wonder why...my voice is just so incredibly audible when I'm sick), I really am enjoying our deployment out here. eating lunch outside on a picnic table overlooking the rest of virginia isn't so bad. even if I do have to zip my jacket up to my ears and keep my hands wedged into my cargo pockets because it tends to get pretty chilly on the highest point in shenandoah valley. 

overall, though. I have to say this beautiful fall season is making me fall in love with small country towns. 

63 days

sitting at our miniature table all on our laptops finishing up personal statements, city year and college applications, attempting to plan for our futures after FEMA corps. needless to say, it's been an overwhelming process that's led to a lot of facebook and a lot of chocolate.

I've already become reminiscent of my time in this program. looking through facebook photos, re-reading blog posts, thinking about the first few months living out of my duffel...it's all been a very strange process. in the best way possible. 

our time with the deployment unit at mt weather has been incredible. things have been getting busy with the flooding in colorado and now in new mexico. it's been pretty exciting seeing where all of the FEMA personnel will be sent and to actually be the people who send them there. I feel like I'm directly helping the agency carry out its mission of getting to disaster sites and helping the survivors as quickly as possible. 

I've been trying to soak in the small town country life as much as possible. I can't help but ogle out the windows every time we drive anywhere, like a child who hasn't seen a thunderstorm or falling leaves or deer on the side of the road before (which I guess I am...since I am from a place where weather rarely happens and wildlife are scarcely seen). 

I have 63 days left of my time in americorps nccc-FEMA corps, and am really trying to make the most of every possible moment. 

white house

sitting in a starbucks down the street from the white house, trying to write and complete personal statements for two graduate programs I hope to apply to by the end of today. not the easiest task after the morning I've had. 

this morning, I was honored to speak at the white house in front of the national task force about my experience with FEMA corps. I greeted mr. serino, the deputy administrator of FEMA, to begin the morning and it just went from there. halfway through the morning, I followed rich serino's talk and was introduced by wendy spencer, the ceo of the corporation for national and communitiy service. I basically went over everything I have written about in this blog. in two minutes. and left out the fact that I'm keeping a blog (to sound maybe a bit more professional than just a duffel-living, van-traveling, blog-writing, boot-wearing corps member). I think it went well. 

I was approached by several members of the task force later on and thanked for both my time to speak this morning and for my service to disaster survivors. which I responded by profusely thanking them for letting me be there to speak in front of them. 

after talking with asim mishra, the deputy chief of staff at cncs, about our common experiences during our years of service and the impact it had on both our lives, I think his comment about sums it up: at 24, did you ever think you'd be casually walking by the white house after speaking in front of members from obama's administration? 

no, no I did not. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. 

needless to say, this morning was an incredible start to my 24th year (as I officially became another year older this past monday) and I am so grateful to have been given the opportunity to represent national service members across the country.

virginia updates

working as a deployment specialist at mt. weather has been quite the enjoyable experience. today was my first real day "out on the floor" (FEMA deployment lingo) with my headset all on my lonesome. and might I say, it didn't go half bad. I've been making calls to FEMA reservists with deployment requests as well as answering phone calls from FEMA personnel who need to either check in or out of their assigned disasters, change their lodging addresses, etc. "the floor" has proved to be a pretty exciting place to be. 

this past weekend, I went with a few teammates to a tailgate festival in old town winchester where I'm pretty sure every winchester resident was in attendance. I can't begin to describe my newfound love for small towns. they are my favorite type of town. the food, the lingo, the people, the corn hole tournaments (west coast friends-google it. yes, people really play corn hole as a social activity). everything was wonderful. there were beer and wine tastings and everyone knew everybody else. at one point, the sheriff was leaning over a fence to catch up with another local and was there for a good half hour. it was a perfect day for a tailgate event (especially since my strange 24-hour strep throat episode was petering out by that point and I was more delusional and tired than achy and dying, like I had been the previous afternoon). things are really looking up over here in virginia. 

also, this past weekend, my team and I volunteered at a puppy adoption charity fundraiser at barrel oak winery in the  virginia countryside. we assisted with the silent auction, monitoring the food table so dogs didn't slobber all over the human food, grilled some veggie burgers and hotdogs, sold doggie halloween costumes (I've really missed out on a huge part of life by never having a dog...). the winery is purposefully puppy friendly and located on the most gorgeous little section of rolling hills I've ever seen. it got real hot and humid in that lovely ameriuniform as the afternoon went on, but the location was too beautiful to care about the sweat trickling down my back (let's not kid ourselves...it was water-falling down my back. wow, this whole living-out-of-a-duffel thing has really lowered my standards hasn't it....) anyhow, I got to pretend for an entire afternoon that I owned a pet for the first time in my life, as well as encourage others in attendance to adopt the dogs that need a home. it was a well spent afternoon indeed.

oh and I turned 24. so there's that.

also in other news.....

I've recently learned that I will be speaking at a national task force meeting at the white house this friday to emphasize the importance of national service. it will be just me, my khakis, and a room of representatives from seventeen federal agencies. tomorrow I will be prepping for my two minute FEMA corps schpeel. details to come later. 

in the meantime....photos.

"welcome to our little corner of the world"

I woke up from my luxurious ten minute van nap after work yesterday to my van-driving teammate yelling because a bear was crossing the road in front of us. 

I guess the perks of working in the woods.

I've seen more wildlife in the past few days (whether on our commute to/from work or driving through the virginia/maryland/dc countrysides) than I have probably since childhood. I have tried countless times to capture the beauty of this area (mainly through blurry/low definition/last minute iphone camera snapshots) and can't find a way to do it. so in the meantime, I'm trying to figure out a way to convince myself it's ok not to store anything and everything on my overflowing iphone photo gallery and to just live in the moment and appreciate my beautiful surroundings for what they are. 

this first week of work has been full of information, trainings, run-throughs, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (because I'm an adult), phone call trials, powerpoints, new passwords, coffee on coffee on coffee, welcoming words, (somewhat risky) van mountain driving, and the most encouragement I could have ever asked for. the people in the unit we work in at mt. weather are incredibly kind, warm, supportive, generous, and open. I am looking forward to moving out of training and into our job of (if I leave out all of the technical details and spare you from three days worth of training notes) essentially deploying FEMA personnel to various disasters. due to the high volume of information my brain has been taking in and probably the  lack of nutrients my body has been receiving (likely the result of an excessive amount of pb&j...) I am writing this blog from my bed in our housing while attempting to justify a 6pm sleep time to my to-be-24yr old self. 

I must say that I am incredibly content living in a small country town in northern virginia where my coworkers own farms and race their racehorses and the leaves are promised to show signs of fall soon. I couldn't imagine being anywhere else on a newly-humidity-free brisk september evening. 

however, I am now off to thoroughly examine the inside of my eyelids...

back in virginia

we've officially settled in winchester, virginia (which isn't exactly saying much since we never really "settle" anywhere...but let's just roll with it, shall we?).

we begin our first day of work tomorrow, assisting with the deployment unit at mt. weather. we will be in training all week, so details on job specifics are to come (unless job specifics being announced publicly via my blog post are against the rules, in which case I will most definitely not be posting specifics and risking breaking department of homeland security rules. I don't know if I have enough brainpower or emotional energy to deal with getting in trouble with the federal government right now...flashback to being in a van going across the country for six days...). 

we'll be dressing up in our lovely FEMA tuxes tomorrow (consisting of black cargo pants, blue FEMA polo, and steel-toeds...what else?). and I should probably get to sleep because I'm not sure how appropriate it is to fall asleep in the middle of training on your first day at a high security federal government command center...

more on our third round deployment duties to come later (or not, depending on what the department of homeland security will allow).